Because the erroneous decimal point is more than just a simple mistake: in fact the decimal point reveals far more about the Tories’ own “Two Nations” than it does about anything else in that report.

Now obviously, since it was picked up earlier by the MSM, the mistake’s already been rectified in the document, but for those that missed it here’s a brief run-down of events.

Yesterday, to much fanfare, the Tories released this report which they claimed was a “comprehensive assessment of the level of inequality under Labour”

In fact here’s the tweet, which says just that:

The problem is that in the report they claimed that a massive 54% of teenage girls living in the country’s most deprived areas are likely to fall pregnant before they get to 18. That’s right: 54%! Well, as has now been pointed out, that decimal point was in the wrong place: the actual figure should have been 5.4%.

But it took others outside of the Conservative Party to point the mistake out to them. It took people with a grasp of sodding reality to read that figure and go: “Hang on, 54%? That can’t be right!” and delve a bit deeper into the stats.

But I wonder how many Tory Party faithful had already checked through the report prior to its publication yesterday; I wonder how many of them had looked at that figure, nodded along, and thought: “54% of ’em pregnant: yep, sounds about right.” Or alternatively, and probably more realistically, how many of them had read it and muttered to themselves “54% of ’em. 54% of the feckless sponging hordes spawning kids just so they can get their own council houses and benefits and live in luxury off the rest of us just like their feckless sponging work-shy parents before ’em”

If ever proof were needed that David Cameron’s oh-so-modern and caring Conservatives are completely out of touch with the lives of ordinary people, this is it. If ever proof were needed that the Tories haven’t got a fucking clue, it’s here, in their willingness to accept without question that over half of teenage girls living in deprived areas are up the spout before they’re barely out of nappies themselves.

Welcome to the new Conservatives: spouting the same old same old hysterical Daily Mail shite they always have.

“54% of ‘em. 54% of the feckless sponging hordes spawning kids just so they can get their own council houses and benefits and live in luxury off the rest of us just like their feckless sponging work-shy parents before ‘em”
It might even be worse than that. They probably thought “5.4%? Is that it? I went to a council estate once. Ghastly place, positively brimming with harlots. Must be a typo”.

The 5.4% figure is the proportion of 14to16s who fall pregnant in a single year. It’s a number intended to help someone answer the question:

There are x thousand female 14to16s in our neighbourhood, how many are likely to present as pregnant this year?

The more interesting question for moralists, politicians, and sociologists is this one:

What proportion of the females in our neighbourhood have by their 17th birthday, already been pregnant?

The answer to this question is, roughly, 3 x 5.4% of them. That is about 16% who will have been pregnant by the time they are 17.

What is truly depressing about this little spat is that we are having politics done, and decisions made, by people on who are clearly unable to read a simple statistical document and grasp the information it communicates.

Where by 2001 pregnancies to under18s were approaching 90 per thousand per year as compared to about 45 per thousand per year for the whole of England and Wales.

So it’s likely 30% of 18yos in Southwark LB would have become pregnant by the time they were 18. Add to that the author’s remark that:
“Highest teenage pregnancy rates tend to run across the middle of the borough, correlating closely with deprivation.” and we can see that the rate in the more deprived neighbourhoods would in fact be far closer to 50% than to 5%.

Which said, why would any young woman faced with a ‘career’ of variable hour minimum wage jobs postpone having children until she was in her twenties or thirties?

I note though that the presentation covers 1998-2001, and that in the targets it lists:

By 2010, to reduce the conception rate among under 18s in the worst quintile of wards by at least 60%, thereby reducing the level of inequality between the worst quintile and the average by at least 26% by 2010.

“The number of teenage pregnancies in England and Wales, already high, is rising again, figures from the Office for National Statistics show: up from 40.9 conceptions per 1,000 among 15-17-year-olds in 2006 to 41.9 a year later.

It is the first increase since 2002 and it means that the British government will miss its target – one backed by millions in Treasury funding – of halving rates, which are the highest in Europe, by 2010.”

could possibly imagine that their activities will have any significant influence on the behaviouf the the targeted young people. eg:

“Undertaking scrutiny of a potentially controversial subject helped to cement relationships with partners and to show that the Scrutiny Committee would have ‘teeth’.
• The work reinforced the need to base evidence on input from expert witnesses rather than just anecdotal evidence.
• Expert witnesses may provide conflicting evidence, so the Scrutiny Committee needs to consider carefully how it deals with such conflict so as to maintain credibility while keeping stakeholders on board”

or this:

“Involve service users, in this case young people. This provides powerful evidence of effective planning (of course, this does mean accepting evidence that emerges from this consultation), and contributes towards equitable planning processes.”

or this:

“Take scrutiny members away from the town hall into community settings to meet and talk with young people, both young men and women. Do not assume that members know everything about the target group, delivery setting, or topic under review.”

Seeing as we seem to be in the business of clarifying statistics, I am not sure that hoplite’s interpretation of the stats is 100% correct. The assumption that 5.4% of under 17’s leads to 16% of girls by the time they reach 17 relies on the assumption that we are taking about evenly distributed pregnancies, i.e. 5.4% of 14 year olds, a different 5.4% of 15 year olds and another 5.4% of 16 year olds. In my opinion the more likely interpretation would be that a much smaller proportion of girls will have experienced multiple pregnancies by the time they are 18.

But Cath! If they stopped doing things like fucking up statistics and harrumphing about ‘Broken Britain,’ then they would have to ask: why do some people feel like they have to be teenage mothers, and how/why is Britain ‘broken’?

One way of thinking about this situation is to ask a counterfactual question:

Suppose no teenagers were becoming single mothers, what would we do to encourage them to become single mothers?

Perhaps:

Ensure there was no stigma to single parenthood.

Ensure there was no stigma to becoming pregnant when still at school.

Make sure all schools provide, free of charge, facilities to accommodate young mothers.

Offer flats at a subsidised low rent only to teenage girls, but not to those who remain childless.

Ensure that the social security/unemployment benefits payable to childless teenagers of either sex are so low they can neither live independently on them nor pursue their education.

Adjust the tax and benefit rules so that if a partner, of either sex moves in with a single mother her income is reduced by exactly as much as the new partner brings into the household. And, of course, ensure that if the partner leaves the mother’s income is raised to compensate for the loss of the partner’s income.

Adjust the tax and benefit rules so that a single mother of nay age who moves from earning minimum wage for 17 hours a week to earning much more for forty hours a week receives in her hand after adjustment of tax and benefits only 10p in the pound of her extra earnings.

“The responses of thousands of 18-year-olds questioned for the Youth Cohort Study and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England were analysed.

The findings show that of the 18-year-old girls questioned about pregnancy, 18 per cent had been pregnant at least once.

Of these, almost eight in 10 (79 per cent) had been expecting a baby on just one occasion, nearly one in five (18 per cent) had been pregnant twice, and 3 per cent had been pregnant at least three times.”

This goes a long way to answering Krotowski’s question about uneven distribution : of the 18% who have been pregnant at least once, one in five have been pregnant twice and a thirtieth three times. So the 18% is made up like this

00.54% pregnant thrice or more by 18
03.24% pregnant twice by 18
14.22% pregnant once by 18

46%, of the children were carried to term and kept.

However the truly revealing figures are those relating to poverty and education:

“A third (33 per cent) of those who gained between one and four GCSEs at grades D-G had been pregnant at least once by the time they were 18, compared to just 6 per cent of those who scored eight or more GCSEs at Grades A*-C.”

Anecdote leads me to suspect that there is also a skew along the same socio-economic axis in the ratio of pregnancies that are aborted or not. Some years ago an exam officer colleague (whose duties included receiving submissions from students of events likely to affect their performance in the January exams) confided to me that three of the women students in our Russell Group dept had had abortions during that Christmas vacation. This surprised me – for neither of us could remember when we had last had a non-mature student mother in the dept. I later dug up the Registrar General’s stats for abortions in the 18-22 age group and discovered that, given the number of female students in the dept, we might expect about six abortions a year.

Hoplite I know a (just) 17 year old with 8 GCSE’s who had a baby – my niece.

Oh and the child doesn’t live in a council flat, he lives with his mother and grandparents in a privately owned big fuck off six bedroomed house in a nice suburb worth approximately 1/2 a million. His mother earns more than me and childcare is shared with the child’s grandparents. I blame the parents, obviously.

The ‘have a baby and you’ll get a council house’ myth is the biggest lie going. It just isn’t supported by the facts.

If we start from the assumption that teenage pregnancy is undesirable (I don’t really see WHY we should start with that assumption if the mother is over 16 though, if you’re old enough to have sex, you’re old enough to have a baby) the question is not – why are pregnanies occurring (it’s called sexual intercourse, and no contraceptive method is foolproof) but why are pregnant women not having abortions? And the answer varies of course, but quite often a middle class woman will be under more external pressure to have an abortion. Because she will be seen as having ‘ruined her life’ and her oh so valuable education if she gives birth under 18.

Sometimes women WANT to continue with a pregnancy. I can’t see anything wrong with that. Why is it undesirable to have a baby at 18, but desirable to have one at 28?

I don’t think (and I’m totally putting words in his/her mouth, sorry) that Hoplite meant that all single mothers end up in council flats and have their lives ruined.
They don’t, obviously.
I think the point was that teen pregnancy disproportionately affects girls from less well-off backgrounds, who are, also, more likely to get pregnant anyway (not to mention, less likely to have abortions).
Best of luck to your niece, but she’s going to have far less of an effect on her life from having a kid than a girl from a council estate *even if that girl also had eight GCSEs*.
I do agree with you though that having babies as a teenager isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, in itself. Of course it’s always a woman’s choice what she does with her body, and that does go both ways (like you, I’d have reservations about under 16s though).
I just think that having children while so young does have an impact on the future life opportunities of teenage girls, and especially those from more working-class backgrounds. I know some succeed despite this, and again, it’s their decision, but it’s a lot harder.
It’s not an age thing, to me. I’m 29 and couldn’t be trusted to look after a house plant, let alone a kid. Some women are grown-ups at 16, 17, or 18 though and if they are mature enough to look after a baby, that’s fine.
Also, I agree that ‘getting pregnant for a council house’ is a stupid myth.

Butterflywings thanks for a sympathetic reading. (And I did leave myself open to “teenage single mother claimant bashing” when I wrote: “Suppose no teenagers were becoming single mothers, what would we do to encourage them to become single mothers?”, but my intent was to raise the complementary question: why have young educated women seeking professional careers increasingly delayed motherhood into their late thirties. )

In her original post Cath wrote:

“… they claimed that a massive 54% of teenage girls living in the country’s most deprived areas are likely to fall pregnant before they get to 18”

“If ever proof were needed that the Tories haven’t got a fucking clue, it’s here, in their willingness to accept without question that over half of teenage girls living in deprived areas are up the spout before they’re barely out of nappies themselves.”

So my first response was to notice that Cath had misunderstood the 5.4% which was an annual rate and suggest that one might reasonably infer that about 15% of all teenage females had been pregnant by the time they were 17. The much more recent article in the Independent for 18yos suggests that this estimate was a reasonably accurate one. It also provides some information which suggests that teenage pregnancy rates vary between socio-economic groups and I speculated that the proportion of pregnancies brought to term might also vary between socio-economic groups.

I’m not convinced that teenage in motherhood is intrinsically a “bad thing”, especially in the context of an extended family. But equally, I’m not convinced that, for a 16yo who is fairly clear, having failed her GCSEs, that her working future will be much like that of her mother and aunt and cousins, becoming a mother quite soon is a bad idea. If you do not envisage a future around a developing career with substantial income progression and a house purchased with a mortgage, why should you delay your first children from your late teens and early twenties to your early thirties? Surely applying yourself to a future in dull and low-paid employment is no substitute for getting on with something really important – like having children.

Moreover I’m fairly convinced that the differences in fertility and child birth between the teenage females of various socio-economic strata, and indeed between ethnic/religious communities, are the largely inevitable outcome of differing values and a substantially correct understanding of their present and future material and economic situation – just as much for the middle class teenagers, the ones with surprisingly rich in-laws, and for the very poor.

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